Visualization

QA171 QUESTION: What is the relationship between the mind and the energy center which is located around the stomach? Also, you said earlier that one of the greatest powers was in expanding the illusory limitations of the mind, and then in another context you said that the height of spiritual power is located on the top of the head. Can you please clarify all of this?

ANSWER: The solar plexus region is where man can communicate with – be in actual contact with – the divine intelligence and the deeper feelings, the creative inspiration, and actually the intelligence of the supreme being. This manifests through the solar plexus region and finally reaches and integrates with man’s mind.

Now, you do not communicate with the divine through the center at the top of the head. But when the total integration has taken place, this center opens up and infuses the entire organism – the physical, the mental, the emotional, the spiritual organism – with a spiritual energy that is so powerful that it cannot even be conveyed in words. Now, that is the difference.

The one is a direct channel of communication. The other you experience as a result and which is the culmination of having opened and regulated and brought into balance the other centers.

QUESTION: On a more practical level: in meditation, we sometimes visualize ourselves in different situations than we are. I interpret that to mean breaking down the limitations of our mind. {Yes} In doing that, what is the relationship between the feelings in the solar plexus or the concept in the mind. What’s the way to activate it properly?

ANSWER: You remember I many times discussed and mentioned the expression “soul substance.” Soul substance is the creative matter that formulates people’s lives. All the concepts and the beliefs and ideas and the sum total of what the personality expresses formulates his personal soul substance. It is the personality; it’s the life pattern; it’s the blueprint for his life.

Now, if the soul substance is imprinted with false ideas, the first step is naturally to make these ideas conscious – the misconceptions must become conscious. Once this is done, the next step in the meditational process would be that you see yourself being governed by this false idea.

You see and observe – in the course of this work – the constant patterns you have reenacted according to this misconception. That means your soul substance is still indoctrinated with these false ideas. This is why one must fall back – because the soul substance is not corrected immediately.

You may have a breakthrough; you may have an immediate revelation where you have – as a result of certain efforts on your part and helpful conditions you have put yourself in – succeeded in reacting, not according to the indoctrinated soul substance, but according to a new way of reaction.

But since the soul substance is still impregnated with the wrong way, with the false idea, you must go back. Therefore, the reorientation process I discussed before must be done with what the mind knows. Now that your mind knows, “This is the wrong concept I am governed by, but here it would be the right concept. Here I see it is possible to react in this and that and that way.”

As you experience yourself doing that in fantasy, visualizing it, you reorient the soul substance; little by little, without putting pressure but simply by creating new visual images into the soul substance, the change takes place.

There the interaction between the mental processes, where they are properly used – the faculties are used in exactly the way they should serve – and the emotional processes, the creative emotional processes come together.